The Man Who Pulled Back the Curtain

The journalist and author Joe McGinniss, who died this week at age 71, wrote many controversial books in his career—including Fatal Vision, about a famous 1970s murder case—but in truth his long and often-disappointing career was largely a footnote to his breakthrough work, The Selling of the President, 1968. Written when he was just 26 years old, that book caused a sensation with its scandalized recounting of the cynical image-making that drove Richard Nixon’s triumphant presidential bid. Ironically, however, the book’s success was itself the product of image-making and hype—as McGinniss inflated the well-established and (by 1968) fairly routine business of political spin into a veritable crime against democracy. And yet even as McGinniss oversold what he was claiming about the Nixon campaign, his book had a profound impact, helping to alter the way that journalists covered politics thereafter.

To be sure, the original master of the behind-the-scenes exposé, the man whose specter haunts McGinniss’s slim volume, was Theodore H. White, whose Making of the President 1960 had eight years earlier spotlighted the once-neglected role of campaign strategy by chronicling the race between Nixon and John F. Kennedy. White quickly inspired imitators, including White himself, who turned the Making of the President conceit into a quadrennial franchise. McGinniss was among the many who followed in White’s footsteps, glimpsing great material in the machinations of the presidential campaign. A writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer, McGinniss had tried in 1968 to gain access to the ad firm Doyle, Dane, Bernbach, which the Democrats had hired, but was shut out. The Nixon people, fatefully, let him tag along.

Exactly how he gained access remains unclear. In 1990, writing about what she saw as McGinniss’s betrayal of Jeffrey MacDonald, the convicted killer at the center of his 1983 bestseller Fatal Vision, the New Yorker’s Janet Malcolm described the journalist—all journalists, but McGinniss in particular—as a “confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.” The modus operandi seems to have applied as well to McGinniss’s approach to Nixon’s men. According to the memoir of Leonard Garment, one of those campaign aides who naively gave McGinniss the run of the Nixon shop, the young writer “laughed at our gibes, sympathized with our difficulties, offered judicious and helpful suggestions.” According to some, McGinniss won entrée by claiming he was a graduate student writing a thesis.

Whatever his come-on, McGinniss tailed Nixon’s media men into sessions from which other reporters were barred. He sat with them during casual chats and cafeteria planning sessions, gathering the goods for his grand exposé. He transcribed their bloodless efforts to remake Nixon—long anathema to liberals, and, since his notorious 1960 debate performance against JFK, a presumed dud on TV—into a mature statesman. Some of Nixon’s men, notably a young producer for the “Mike Douglas Show” named Roger Ailes, who Nixon brought on board as a TV adviser, furnished the journalist with irresistible copy. As Ailes told him:

Let’s face it, a lot of people think Nixon is dull. Think he’s a bore, a pain in the ass. They look at him as the kind of kid who always carried a bookbag … Now you put him on television, you’ve got a problem right away. He’s a funny-looking guy. He looks like somebody hung him in a closet overnight and he jumps out in the morning with his suit all bunched up and starts running around saying, “I want to be President.” I mean this is how he strikes some people. That’s why these shows are important. To make them forget all that.

These and other blunt statements from the staff—as well as Marshall McLuhan-quoting memos that they gave McGinniss—allowed the journalist to make the rather overblown claim that these aides were fabricating from whole cloth a new Nixon. In truth, even the despicable Nixon had an appealing side—at least as far as many Americans were concerned—and like all imagemeisters, Ailes and company were trying to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative. Just as Malcolm would later dub McGinniss a con man, so McGinniss called politics a “con game” as he derided the “insidious” trickery of Nixon’s handlers, purveyors of deceit.